25 February 2011

Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver (2009)

At the center of the brief novel Le voyage d'hiver (Winter Journey) is the relationship between Zoïle, Astrolabe, and Aliénor. Zoïle's occupation involves contacting people who have just moved house to discuss their energy 'needs', and he describes himself as 'vaguely' employed by the EDF (Électricité de France) and GDF (Gaz de France). He meets the young women Astrolabe and Aliénor in the course of a visit and is shocked that they have no heating in December and that their appartment roof is made of glass: they wear several layers of clothing and insist that they can afford no heating because buying the flat has taken up all their money.

They are an odd couple: Astrolabe is beautiful but Aliénor has a harelip, foams at the mouth, eats anything put in front of her without knowing when to stop, and suffers from 'Pneux's disease', a 'benign' form of autism that is another invention of Nothomb's. Zoïle assumes that Aliénor is an idiot, but becomes increasingly preoccupied by Astrolabe. He knows from the beginning that the owner of the property is a certain A. Malèze, who is a novelist , so he starts to read her books and returns to the appartment to learn that Aliénor is in fact the author: her publishers treated her cruelly, so Astrolabe has chosen to be a kind of permanent literary agent-cum-nursemaid to her: Aliénor has to dictate her novels, and her illness is such that she doesn't care for personal hygiene, so Astrolabe even has to wash her.

Very quickly, Zoïle falls in love with Astrolabe, although she refuses to leave Aliénor out of her sight, and even their kisses take place under Aliénor's (re)searching gaze. Then he has an odd idea: they'll all take magic mushrooms. After this is done, he puts on the electronic music of Aphex Twin (or Richard D. James) and they trip for eight hours. Aliénor just closes her eyes and absorbs her first psychedelic experience internally, while Zoïle and Astrolabe filter the experience through the physical world, seeing things far differently from Aliénor.

During the trip, Astobabe asks Zoile:

'Pourquoi cessons-nous de voir en grandissant?'. ('Why do we stop seeing when we grow up?'. )

I've already written a little about Nothomb's early childhood - the fact that physically she was a virtual cabbage for her first two and a half years following a breech birth, that she didn't speak a word and only made the slightest of movements in order to eat. Her books have suggested that life more or less ends at puberty, and adulthood is merely seen as a precursor to death. Le voyage d'hiver, though - incidentally the same title as Perec's short story mentioned below, and both authors of course are very much concerned with loss - appears to suggest a greater optimism about adulthood, although childhood is still a period in which 'real' life is played out. What's being said now is that hallucinogenic mushrooms, for instance, permit adults to revisit that childhood.

Zoïle remembers when he was tripping on the métro once, and was horrified by a man's tie: 'Comment avons-nous pu nous aveugler au point de trouver la laideur supportable? [...] Porter une telle cravatte, c'est une insulte, un attentat, un acte de mépris, ce comportement respire la haine, voila, ce type me hait, il hait le genre humain.' (How has it been possible for us to blind ourselves to the point of making ugliness bearable? [..] To wear such a tie is an insult, an attack, an act of contempt, this behavior stinks of hatred - that's it - this guy hates me, he hates humankind.')

The lucidity of tripping makes Zoïle arrive at a kind of Sartrean conclusion: 'l'enfer, ce n'est même pas l'autre entier: sa cravatte suffit.' ('hell is not even just the whole other person: his tie's enough'.)

However hell is other people for Zoïle, and he reads Astrolabe's stone(d) reaction to his sexual overtures as rejection. Astrolabe tells him that Gustave Eiffel designed the Eiffel Tower in the shape of an 'A' because of his consuming love for a young woman called, er, Amélie, so she inadvertently provides this perceived rejected lover with his apocalyptic plan.

Zoïle will go though airport security, buy a dutyfree bottle of champagne, pour it down the pan, smash it to leave him holding the jagged neck, with which he will slit the throats of the pilots, take control of the plane, and direct it straight at the Eiffel Tower.

And Le voyage d'hiver - unlike Perec's title - seems appropriate. The whole book is set in winter, there's a hallucinogenic trip and a planned airplane hi-jack, and Schubert's Le voyage d'hiver is what Zoïle will be thinking of - as a completely irrelevant thing to leave his mind almost blank - when he carries out his planned act of insanity.

The book is also very Nothomb: we have a claustrophobic largely one-room setting, ugliness and beauty, obsession, madness with (potential) violence, etc.

Britaine

Slump, by Will Self

Gallia – Ménie Muriel Dowie

Gallia (1895) is a rather obscure novel which emphatically belongs to the New Woman sub-genre, and concerns a young intellectual woman who refuses to comply with the prevailing gender constructs: this is a Victorian woman with spunk.

Westering Women

Chancy develops the theory of culture-lacune, a revolutionary strategy by means of which Haitian women writers both celebrate and fight the absence and the loss which has been the female voice in the history of the country. In Haitian women writers, a folkloric figure is used as a tool: they 'reformulate the marabout eternalized in Oswald Durand's still popular folksong "Choucoune" of 1883.' Whereas Durand's Choucoune is a figure of betrayal who stands for a lost Haiti, the women writers transform her and reclaim her for themselves. Some writers included in this study are Anne–christine d'Adesky, Ghislaine Charlier, Marie Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, Edwidge Danticat, and the earlier writers Virgile Valcin, and Annie Desroy.

The Clansman – Thomas Dixon

The Marrow of Tradition – Charles W. Chesnutt

At the end of The Marrow of Tradition (1901), the black Dr Miller enters the house of the white Carteret family in an attempt to save the life of their young child. Previously, Major Carteret had not allowed Miller to tend to his son because Miller is black, and Miller's own young son has just died in a skirmish instigated by the Major himself. Clearly, Chesnutt's focus of interest is not on the fate of the white family's son, but on the integrity of Dr Miller. The novel is set 'Wellington', although there are parallels between this fictional town and Wilmington, North Carolina, which was the scene of a 'race riot' in 1898. Dr Miller represents the 'New Negro', the educated, ambitious and socially aware black person beginning to emerge through many years of slavery in the Southern states, through the subservience of Uncle Tomism, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and now through the appalling compromise of the Jim Crow laws in the South.* Most of all, though, all black people have to battle against a wall of prejudice that still exists, where whites not only segregate and bar, but are only too eager, particularly via lynching, to apply the rule of the mob. The book is a kind of thriller and obviously is influenced by many Victorian novels that have gone before it (and there is an unfortunate strong touch of melodrama towards the end), but it is evident that the novel's main purpose is didactic. *Along with T. S. Stribling's Birthright and Chesnutt's own Mandy Oxendine, there is a scene in which the segregation of blacks from whites on a train takes place.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – John Berendt

I approached this book, which Edmund White calls a 'non-fiction novel', with some caution because of its great popularity: I'm generally very suspicious of books that are popular. However, I was very pleasantly surprised, and also surprised that it has in fact proved so popular, as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is hardly a conventional novel. It's a love affair John Berendt had with Savannah, Georgia, and which brought a stream of tourists into the city in search of the human and architectural sights mentioned, such as Bonaventure Cemetery (where the poet Conrad Aiken's bench grave stands), or perhaps a sighting of Savannah's larger-than-life characters, like 'female impersonator' The Lady Chablis, or hope for an invitaton to a party such as the ones thrown by Joe Odom, the highly likeable con merchant. These characters move around the main story, which is the murder of the priapic Danny Hansford by his employer and occasional lover, the antique furniture dealer Jim Williams, who lived in the impressive Mercer House, the former home of songwriter Johnny Mercer. The novel is funny and fast-moving, but there is a structural problem: it is too episodic, and although the murder and subsequent trials are the central issue, the colourful characters who flit in and out of it somehow don't merge too well with this central interest.

Life in the Iron-Mills - Rebecca Harding Davis

First published in 1861 and based on the experiences of Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) in Wheeling, Virginia, which is today in West Virginia, Life in the Iron-Mills is now seen as a seminal work of American realism. This short story, originally published in Atlantic Monthly, was her masterpiece, and was rediscovered by Tillie Olsen, who wrote an Afterword to the Feminist Press edition in 1972.

Birthright - T. S. Stribling

See post for comment (using the 'SEARCH BLOG' facility to the top left of the page).

Feather Crowns - Bobbie Ann Mason

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café - Fannie Flagg

In Country - Bobbie Ann Mason

Mandy Oxendine - Charles W. Chesnutt

This novel was originally written towards the close of the 19th century, and was in fact the first novel Chesnutt wrote. However, The House behind the Cedars (1900) was his first published novel, and it would be 100 years after Mandy Oxendine was written that it was in fact published. This is the story of two mixed race lovers - both of whom could pass for white - Mandy and Tom Lowrey, who part for two years while Tom goes off to educate himself. When he comes back, it is to work in a school for black children, while Mandy is in a white school passing herself as white. Tom's problem is that Mandy now believes that she is in love with the rich womanizer Robert Utley, although the novel develops into a thriller - almost a whodunnit - when Utley is killed when attempting to sexually assault Mandy. A tale of race, class and gender conflict, Mandy Oxendine was considered too daring for publication at the time it was written.

Anitfanaticism: A Tale of the South, by Martha Haines Butt

An anti-Tom novel, and the only novel by this author.

Dorothy Allison – Bastard out of Carolina

Gods in Alabama - Joshilyn Jackson

Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-57

Fremsley (1987) – Ivor Cutler

A collection of poems, musings and observations from the eccentric Glaswegian Ivor Cutler, a man who was admired by people of all ages. When The New Musical Express once asked him how he would spend Christmas, he said in bed, with the bedclothes pulled around him until it went away. The most notable in the collection: 'A Strategy Suit with a Jelly Pocket'.

The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Volume Two: Passages in the Life of a Radical

Roger Vailland: the Man and His Masks – J. E. Flower

Mrs Caldwell Speaks to Her Son (1953; trans. 1968) – Camilo José Cela

Originally published as Mrs. Caldwell habla a su hijo.

Her (1960) – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti is best known as the co-founder of the City Lights bookstore and publisher on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA, which published Allen Ginsberg's first book of poems, Howl, in 1956. Ferlinguettti's most well known work is A Coney Island of the Mind (1960). The bookstore is recommended, as is the pub Vesuvio's next door to it (with Jack Kerouac Alley between), which is a kind of shrine to the Beat Generation.

As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) – Oliver St John Gogarty

Oliver St John Gogarty is perhaps best remembered for his relationship with James Joyce. A former drinking partner of Joyce's in the early years, Gogarty later became the butt of Joyces insults. In Joyce's early poem 'The Holy Office', Gogarty is represented as a snob, and more famously, there is another representation at the beginning of Ulysses (‘stately plump Buck Mulligan’) in the Martello tower: Joyce had stayed with Gogarty in the Martello tower at Sandy Cove.

The Days Before – Katherine Anne Porter

Critical essays from the Texan noted for her short stories Flowering Judas (1930) and Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and for her novel Ship of Fools (1962)

The American 1930s: A Literary History – Peter Conn

Interesting for its inclusion of a number of obscure writers.

A Feast of Snakes (1976) – Harry Crews

Harry Crews is one of the wild men of literature. Of working-class origin, Crews writes about the underbelly of America, of drugs, alcohol abuse, and trailer park communities in the Deep South, for instance. He was born in southern Georgia but has spent most of his life in Florida. The problem is perhaps that he also spent too long parodying himself, and it can make us forget his undoubted importance as a serious writer. This is a link to a youtube interview, in which he boasts of spending 30 years of his life drunk every day, and illustrates this problem very well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpeFmXJG4Ak.

Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 Anne Goodwyn Jones

How Late It Was, How Late (1994) - James Kelman

James Kelman - H. Gustav Klaus

James Kelman - Simon Kövesi

The most comprehensive critical work on Kelman so far, although it was published too late to include his latest novel, Kieron Smith, Boy.

Translated Accounts - James Kelman

A Disaffection - James Kelman

The Ticket That Exploded - William Burroughs

Festus: A Poem - Philip J. Bailey

A plaque on a building on the north corner of Fletcher Gate and Middle Pavement, Nottingham, UK, reveals that the writer Philip James Bailey (1816–1902) once lived there. Bailey was born in Nottingham and educated in Glasgow, and is usually associated with the Spasmodic school of poetry along with J. W. Marston, S. T. Dobell, and Alexander Smith. He is most noted for Festus, a huge work to which Bailey was continually adding, and which was heavily influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost. Its most famous lines are: 'We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts not breaths; / In feeling, not in figures on a dial / We should count time by theart throbs; he most lives / Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best.' There is a bronze bust of Bailey by Albert Toft at the rear entrance to Nottingham Castle.

The Life and Times of Thomas Spence P. M. Ashraf

The Kretzmer Syndrome - Peter Way

The Withered Root (1929) - Rhys Davies

My Wales - Rhys Davies

Soldier Songs - Patrick Macgill

Skerrett - Liam O'Flaherty

A Pig in a Poke - Rhys Davies

The Home-Maker - Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Half an Eye: Sea Stories - James Hanley

The Contradictions - Zulfikar Ghose

The Death of Christopher - John Sommerfield

Boy James Hanley

Rhys Davies: A Critical Sketch - R. L. Mégroz

Ellen Glasgow - Barren Ground

The Back-to-Backs (1930) - J. C. Grant

A real obscurity. When it was published, this book – which depicts life in a mining community – was roundly attacked for what was considered to be a brutal attack on the life of miners. Very little is known of Grant, who also wrote poems, although his birth certificate reveals that he was born in Alnwick, Northumbria, to a father who was an author, newspaper editor, and manager.

Trouble dans les Andains - Boris Vian

Spacetime Inn - Lionel Britton

Senselessness - Horacio Castellanos Moya

Le Rivage des Syrtes - Julien Gracq

Rhinocéros - Eugène Ionesco

The Poor Mouth - Flann O'Brien

Out Such Between Through Christine Brooke-Rose

A Frolic of His Own - William Gaddis

Caligrammes - Guillaume Apollinaire

Belle du Seigneur - Albert Cohen

Plays, Poems and Theatre Writings - Joe Corrie

Trouble in Porter Street - John Sommerfield

Men Adrift - Anthony Bertram

Truly Obscure. A novel about philosopher and a writer who meet on a boat. They talk.